On Paths Unknown discussion
The Anything Goes chit-chat thread (subject to tiny fine-print rules)
I discovered 'have got' (British English, as opposed to 'have gotten' -- American English) when I moved to Cyprus. I remember my mother's reaction on my first visit home: " 'Have got'!? And I thought you had a college (Europeans, read 'university') education," in that scathing tone she reserves for grammar errors. Ouch!
I think I like the font, except the print seems thinner, making it harder to hit the right place when using the tablet.
Ruth wrote: "Ouch!"Ouch indeed. 'Gotten' has always sounded vulgar to me. After 46 years in the colonies, I got used to almost everything in American English, but I draw the line at zee (used for a letter—I'm fine with it for a body of water in the Netherlands!) and gotten.
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Ouch indeed. 'Gotten' has always sounded vulgar to me. After 46 years in the colonies, I got used to almost everything in American English, but I draw the line at zee (used for..."
LOL. I had never actually heard that there was a controversy surrounding the mighty z until just a couple of weeks ago, when I saw someone online specify the 'zed' pronunciation (I forgot what was being discussed).
Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "I forgot what was being discussed"oh! You can use "gotten" there: "I have forgotten what was being discussed" :-)
I think "forgotten" demonstrates that this is one of the many cases where those using British English who decry the abuse Americans have heaped on the language, fail to realize that often, it's the Brits whose language changed. Forgotten and gotten are from the same root, and Oxford says that "got" and "gotten" "as past participles of get ... both date back to Middle English", but the Americans are still using gotten, and the British now only keep it in forms like forgotten.
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Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "It seems to me that I read an article not too long ago about American English in many instances being a preservation of more archaic forms (vs. British English), but I have forgotten where that was..."I learned that as a general linguistic principle, the group that leaves the 'motherland' tends to hold on to the forms as the forms were when the group left.
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I had an English teacher in high school who taught us something to that effect, that groups exposed to 'outsiders' (in this case, natives and the French) tend to more fiercely hold to the language and customs they have rather than accepting new innovations. I don't know if the psychology he outlined is correct, but it the phenomenon certainly seems to be real.
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Ouch indeed. 'Gotten' has always sounded vulgar to me. After 46 years in the colonies, I got used to almost everything in American English, but I draw the line at zee (used for..."
I'm totally okay with zee, but I agree with gotten. That and "done done it". :D
...and the time format and the lack of metrical usage. :P
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I prefer the shorter versions: to me for instance armour looks really funny.
Yolande wrote: "I'll use this "anything goes" thread to post something that makes sense to me about buying books. Almost every time I buy a book I tend to start feeling guilty about getting ANOTHER book when I hav..."Yolande, even without viewing the video, I feel better about it already! :)
oh right... The British have no right to quibble with American date formats or lack of Metric usage! One date format's as insane as the other. Real geeks use yyyy.mm.dd (the particular delimiter is pretty much your own choice, though ISO uses dots), and while nobody in Canada or the US has ever questioned me writing dates in ISO format, the English certainly do--to the extent that I won't be allowed to bring my dog if they don't use the 'right' dates on the form. And as for metric, what's with all these distances and speed limits in miles? and weights in... stones!
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That's the way that makes the most sense for me as well. It makes sense when adding days, and/or hours and/or seconds incrementally.
PS. I hate stones myself; as for length and height, I guess I know my height in both systems. :P
I corrected my son last night, He said "Imma goin to watch tv". His father ( English is not his first language) raised his eyebrow. I said, "You mean to say , I am going to watch tv". My son said right, thats what I said. Then a discussion about grammar was had.
The lack of "gotten" in British English was something I did not know...There's always been talk here, although I think it's somewhat a scholarly myth, that we "mountain folk" still have some Elizabethan words/language.
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While we're all gathered chattily around the campfire, I want to point you people to a lot of hard work done by Amy on our "Banned books" project.
Have a look! https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
I wanted to give applause when I saw all that hard work. ;)
Hear, hear! Amazing job, which is going to take me forever to work through but I have started because banned books have always fascinated me.Thanks, Other Amy!
Very good job, but I'll add that your information about Mein Kampf is almost out-of-date, as the copyright expires in 2016, which will prevent Bavaria from using its copyright to prevent publication.
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I have in the meantime created a challenge in this regard here : https://www.goodreads.com/challenges/...
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Ah, thanks, Allen. I was actually more put out by what felt like a sentence fragment than the tense.
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..but I'm curious: has it gone Disney? :P
Traveller wrote: "Anyone been to see Star Wars yet? Cinemas have been so packed that I decided to only go see it on Monday or so...but I'm curious: has it gone Disney? :P"
Stop! Stop! Stop!
I want to see it! I don´t want to know!! I want to experience it ignorantly, the way I did the first few! Exchange phone numbers and talk to each other about it privately! :D
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*puts fingers in ears* LA la la! LA la la!
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I want to see it! I don´t want to know!! I want to experience it ignorantly, the way I did the first few! Exchange phone numbers and talk to each other about it privately! :D "
LOL. Will do, Linda.
I was told by someone who feels exactly the same about the other episodes as I do (except for III, which I just couldn't bring myself to see), that it's a good followup to episode VI, and vastly better than the first (chronologically) trilogy. Someone else said her brother cried when he saw the Millenium Falcon. I was just boggled, because he can't have been born when I first saw the Millenium Falcon.
My dog is finally here! People have been warning me that the plane trip might seriously traumatize her. I swear she's worse after an hour in our car! She apparently found a dead fish to roll in at home, and I told my wife that I trusted she'd wash the dog before sending her. Obviously, she did, because she still smells of shampoo, rather than scared dog.
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That's good to hear, Derek. I was going to skip it since the last set was so bad, but my brother is crazy excited about it. (Once again, we seem to be living in some sort of I-switch-with-you warp; I am the nerd in this family.)
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Aw, reunited!
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Ugh, gross about the fish. Where we used to live, we had roof rats, and if we poisoned them they'd go out in the yard to die. My dogs used to roll in their decomposing corpses, and I thought -that- was bad...
Anyway, I was wondering who was getting which dog (I know your one dog you posted pics of is deceased, but I couldn't remember who was getting the other one). Anyway, that's cool!
Re Star Wars: I was going to watch them all again with the kids, but my son elected to go watch them at a friend's house who was holding a SW sleepover marathon, so... I didn't feel like watching them alone. We'll see...
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BTW! Has anybody here seen the movie Ben Hur?
The Charlton Heston one (in which case, of course) or have they rebooted it as they do with everything these days?
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Traveller wrote: "Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "My dog is finally here! People have been warning me that the plane trip might seriously traumatize her. I swear she's worse after an hour in our car! She appa..."I'll tell you a friend's story about her dog and a skunk some day...
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Ouch
I am so glad we don't have skunks here. Just porcupines. But that is another story.
Porcupines certainly are another story. My last dog took some dozen encounters to learn about porcupines. This one took 5. And when I got her, I thought she was the smartest dog I'd ever had... None of my other dogs took more than two to learn.While I've lived most of my life in areas where there are skunks, I have mostly avoided actually having to deal with skunked dogs (I did have one dog who rolled in dead skunk...). But a friend came to visit this past summer, and brought a friend with her who is a dog groomer. Apparently a LOT of her business is actually cleaning up dogs after skunk encounters. Oh, the stories...
Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "Porcupines certainly are another story. My last dog took some dozen encounters to learn about porcupines. This one took 5. And when I got her, I thought she was the smartest dog I'd ever had... Non..."I grew up on a lake, and the reason my Mom decided to get rid of our dogs was precisely that they´d take off out of the yard, up the stairs, across the road, across that open field, to the next lake over. And way too often, come back smelling of skunk.....strangely enough, the pug (my brother´s dog, my mom was supposed to ¨watch¨¨ him until he got a different apartment--he quickly became devoted to my mom) never ran off if left by himself. But when we let him out together with the Boston terrier, dumb ol´Otto would just follow along wherever Henry led him....across the road, across the field......
My friend was out walking the first dog she had with her boyfriend (now her husband), and they came across a dead one. Teddy (Swiss Bernese) grabbed it. As she was trying to remove it from his mouth (and yes, it still smelled), the head came off in her hand. Her boyfriend went over to the bushes and started retching while she screamed at him, ¨Would you man up and help me over here?!¨¨ That dog, since then, has required a dog walker because he´s so neurotic and tightly wound that he´ll eat anything while they´re gone.....CDs, for example, in addition to the usual plushy things.
Linda wrote: "¨Would you man up and help me over here?!¨"ROFL. I'm not quite sure anybody's man enough for that! Despite the pain (to me as well as the dog, but definitely more the dog), porcupines are a transitory problem. Skunks just keep giving...
Traveller wrote: "Anyone been to see Star Wars yet? Cinemas have been so packed that I decided to only go see it on Monday or so...but I'm curious: has it gone Disney? :P"
Not Disney at all. I loved it. It was really a homage to the first one released, and that I remember fondly from childhood.
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ROFL. I'm not quite sure anybody's man enough for that! Despite the pain (to me as well as the dog, but definitely more the dog), porcupin..."
(view spoiler)
Well, so the friend should have been glad it was a dead skunk and not a live one... though I suspect that they store up that... er... musk? in sacs near the tail, so it would depend where the dog had gotten hold of it, ha ha ha.
I had a Weimaraner dog who always smelled a bit "different" but at some point she really started to smell weirdly bad (not that typical "doggy" flavor, though). You know dogs mark their territory, also via sacs near the tail, and hers not only smelled much worse than that of other dogs, but at a point her glands there became overproductive.
The vet said: "Just bring her over, we'll milk it out for you". Once I had the dog there and the vet smelled what she had in there, he coughingly suggested that he permanently remove the problem via surgery. I eagerly agreed. Not to want to have the dog suffer unnecessarily, but nobody could bear having her close with that pong, which I swear almost started to approach skunk territory.
Anyway, the incisions healed very quickly and we were happily re-united with our now bearable dog.
On Paths Unknown
Books mentioned in this topic
Infinite Jest (other topics)Infinite Jest (other topics)
The Tell-Tale Heart (other topics)
First Person Singular: Stories (other topics)
Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Bruno Schulz (other topics)Fyodor Dostoevsky (other topics)
Umberto Eco (other topics)
Dan Simmons (other topics)
Anthony Doerr (other topics)
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They sure is.......:D
I´ve always lived "up North", but my fav from down South is "I used ta could...."